Books

I am a total bibliophile. I read books like they are going out of style. Perhaps they are. Anyway, I just started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and already I love it. It talks about how disconnected we are from our food supply. Not knowing how it grows or where it came from or how much energy it takes to get it to our plate. It also looks like it's going to talk about how we as a nation have forgotten how to do things. Most people don't even know how to grow things, produce things, without it being shipped prepacked to us. That in particular is one of the things I'm concerned with. I may write an essay on this topic soon in the future but it really concerns me that people have relegated good cooking, or preserving food, or growing your own food to "experts". You don't have to be an "expert" gardener to grow some of your own food just like you don't have to be a chef to cook good food to eat. We need to take back some of our skills from the so called "experts".

My favorite cookbook

Last night I made some oatmeal bread from my favorite cookbook. Which cookbook is that? The More with Less Cookbook. It is a Mennonite cookbook and I love it because so far everything I've made out of it has turned out good and the recipes are comforting. The dishes aren't fancy, just good plain cooking that so many cookbooks can't even fathom. They spend all their time making up the fanciest dishes with expensive ingredients that may or may not actually be good. This cookbook is awesome and has a lot of tips about using leftovers and low cost ingredients. I got the cookbook on ebay several years ago but it looks like you can get it here.
I also recommend Living More with Less. Both are just great to read as well as the tips given in therm.

A great blog to read

Zen Habits

I've been reading this for a few weeks and it gives a lot of great ideas. As always, you don't have to do everything he suggests, you can pick and choose what works for you.